Category Archives: Product

I learned a lesson in sales from a street vendor in Pondicherry, India. When I asked, “what can I get for 200 Rupees?” she arranged a beautiful set of handmade drawstring bags and said, “this is 400.”

The lesson:

Show people what they want, not what they think they can afford.

She doesn’t have a shop or a stall. She simply keeps her bags tied together in a colorful bundle. When it’s time to move on, she picks up her wares and walks down the street.

This level of entrepreneurship is commonplace in India. Across the street from my flat, a teenage boy sets up a pani puri snack cart after school. People invest in stalls that serve coffee, rolling carts of fruits or tee-shirts, folding tables of wallets, or simply an armful of handmade string bags.

Alex Salinsky been living and working in Bangalore India, leading international teams, practicing transcendental meditation, and eating with his hands.

For a long time, I took that to mean “make only promises which I am absolutely sure I can keep, and if there’s any chance I might slip up or the world might prevent it, negotiate a lesser promise.”

So, I only made lame promises like:

“I promise to be there on time, so long as I remember to set my alarm, my car works, the traffic isn’t bad, and my best friend isn’t in the emergency room due to a freak ironing accident.”

or:

“I promise to complete this project to 80% of the features, because time is tight and some of the work will probably be difficult and I don’t know how difficult yet.”

Or I refused to make promises at all.

Today, I’m changing my mindset.

Earlier this year, I was introduced to the concept of “Commitment Over Circumstance,” the idea that we take on challenge before we second-guess ourselves with things like logistics. The benefit of making the commitment before evaluating the circumstance is that it opens us up to do something we would not have thought possible. It allows us the think big, to find that risk can lead to reward, and to realize that we are more powerful than we give ourselves credit for.

Commitment doesn’t mean you don’t mess up.
Commitment means that when you mess up, you clean it up.

Acknowledge your broken agreement to the people you’ve broken it with.

Burrow into what happened to figure out what you valued over your commitment.
Did you value feeling comfortable in your bed for 30 more minutes? Did you value looking good to someone by not ending a conversation early so you could leave on time?

Commit again.

And what happens if you fail?

Then you got to experience the passion, the intensity, the strength of the committed life. And you probably achieved a lot more than you otherwise would have.

When was the last time you committed to something bigger than you, and promised to do whatever it takes to succeed? When will the next time be?

Our team has always included a variety of faces in our products. It’s a credit to the design and casting of our instructional designers and media team. Even so, new eyes provided to us by a partnership with an organization that has been serving people with disabilities for over 30 years have led us to a higher sensitivity to equality in diversity. Our friends have further increased the variety of faces and also led us to notice a potentially prejudicial moment in one of our games just before release. We corrected it instantly.

And this is why…

We will not allow anything to stand between our learners and their learning!
If you take anything away from our swift action in modifying a game, let it be the above sentence.
We will do our best to identify and speedily resolve technical crashes, tricky user interfaces, and scenarios that cause any group of our students to feel that they are less supported than any other group.

Maintaining sensitivity to issues around diversity is especially important to our audience from a business perspective:

11% of Community College enrollees report having a specific disability (source)

And these numbers are felt by school faculty and deans. While one of our salespeople presented our Writing Game Series to the faculty of a local college, heads in the audience nodded knowingly during a short conversation praising the minority representation in management positions in one of our simulations. That’s the reaction we are looking for!

Quick Reads
If you’re interested in exploring the current, very loud conversation on accessibility and diversity in the workplace, check these out:

Gender: Elephant in the Valley.
“84% of women [in the workplace] have been told they were too aggressive.”
The instant popularity of this report, published a few weeks ago, says a lot about our country’s interest in whether the cards are stacked against women in technical roles. It was picked up instantly by FastCompany, Newsweek, and TechCrunch.

Disability: Roger Ebert: Remaking My VoiceThis one is a video (and you might cry)!
“People talk loudly and slowly to me. Sometimes they assume I am deaf. There are people who don’t want to make eye contact.”

It’s not a silver-bullet!
It’s not The One Right Answer!It is an added level
of rigor and scrutiny
to the things we make.

So what is Agile, and why did we move to that framework?

Toolwire has been pioneering online education for about 15 years. Before the term “cloud computing” existed, Toolwire was hosting virtual desktops for education. We’ve led countless learners to success in a plethora of topics.

So why are we changing the way we develop products?

It’s not because we have been building the wrong way. And it’s not because we have been building the wrong things. We have been evolving and even leading change in online education all along.

But because we have the very ambitious goal of building A LOT of new product that expands educational opportunity for every learner. And that involves experimentation…

So, we need to play a new game, with a new rulebook.

Do I understand the goal (and is it the right goal)?
What should I be measuring?
Am I asking the right questions?
Am I allowing teammates to expore answers before I step in?
Am I hearing the answer behind the answer?
Am I hearing the assumptions and constraints implied in what I am told?Am I continuing to see what others are not?Is my team working on the right things?

Sometimes ideas are sold or shot down based on nothing more than intuition.

We have a lot of conversations about the feasibility of an idea… or whether a design for an application is a good one… or how much customers will pay for a service.

It’s okay to start by trusting your gut, but let’s keep a couple things in mind:

We might not be our target user
If your response to an idea is “I wouldn’t like that,” you are speaking for yourself only, not the other 8 billion people on the planet.

Even Steve Jobs was wrong sometimes
The very best people are only right 90% of the time. And we don’t know when they are wrong until after we try the wrong idea.

The Intuition battle is fought on uneven ground
Without data, a disagreement becomes a battle of who has the better intuition. This opens us to making decisions based on fear, seniority, and political ties.

The solution is not surprising…
… and it’s data. Build a test. If you have two opposing ideas, pit them against each other in a user test battle.
Start with your gut; end with real-world feedback.

One of the strongest feelings you can get in life… is the feeling of an ‘A-ha.’ – Penn Jillette

I’ve been leading rooms of people through new ideas and information for the last 10 years. In that time, my biggest takeaway is this:

Talk as little as possible and avoid being the expert.

Instead, set up instruction that allows participants to discover new ideas, and even teach you in the process.

Here are 8 Tips for facilitating group discussion that leads to group-directed learning.

Go after the Uh-oh and the Ah-haThe pursuit of epiphany is what brings us to learning experiences. It’s those moments that bring clarity to the negative patterns in our relationships, the advice that help us break past a sticking point at work, the tip about scrambled eggs that we use for the rest of our lives. Little things with big impacts. Chase them. Ask for them.